A Greek captain, in command of the castle of Belecoma, was betrothed to the beautiful daughter of a neighboring Christian chief. On their marriage night Othman surprised the wedding party as they rode through the dark mountain passes. The short and desperate conflict which ensued could have but one bitter ending. “The bridegroom was slain, and his Greek bride, the Lotus-flower of Brusa, was swept off by the Turkoman robbers to their lair, to become the spouse of their leader’s son.”[4] [4] _The Early Ottomans_, by Dean Church. Orchan was a mere boy when he received this ravished prize, the fair booty of a barbarous strife. Fifty years later, when hair and beard were white with age, he married again; and this time his bride was the daughter of a Christian emperor, not stolen away from friends and kindred, but given to him publicly with superb ceremonies, and a ghastly mockery of rejoicing. In fifty years the Ottoman power had grown into such fierce and sinister lustihood that Theodora, daughter of the Emperor Cantacuzene, was assigned as a precious hostage and seal of friendship between her father and his dreaded Turkish ally. The church refused her blessing to this unholy sacrifice, and, amid the pomp and majesty of imperial nuptials, there was lacking even the outward form of Christian marriage. From that date the tide of Turkish conquest spread with devastating rapidity. The impetuous encroachments of Orchan, the steady and irresistible advances of Amurath, became under Bajazet a struggle for life and death, not with the enfeebled powers of Greece, but with a rival conqueror who had swept from the broad Tartar steppes to subdue and lay waste the Eastern world. Eight dynasties had already been destroyed, eight crowned heads had been laid low, when Timour, grimly ready for a ninth victim, encountered the hitherto invincible sultan. They met, and Bajazet, who had seen the flower of French and German chivalry perish at his command, who had sat at his tent-door to witness the day-long massacre of Christian prisoners, and who had shadowed the very walls of Constantinople,--Bajazet was crushed like a worm by the lame, white-haired old Tartar, and, eating out his heart with dull fury, died in shameful captivity. But his race survived, vigorous, elastic, defiant, and renewed its strength with amazing swiftness under Mahommed the Restorer and Amurath the Second, whose reign was one long conflict with the Greek Emperor Manuel, with Sigismund of Hungary, and, hardest of all to subdue, with those warlike Sclavonic tribes who, often defeated but never conquered, maintained with superb courage the freedom of their mountain fastnesses. It was an unknown Servian soldier who slew Amurath the First in the very moment of his triumph; it was the Albanian chief Scanderbeg who repulsed Amurath the Second, and hurled him back to die, shamed and heart-broken, at Adrianople.